“With most of the dragons, it seems to have affected them to some extent as it did you. They bring their dinner up, or sluice it out the other end, and suffer from a fever.”
The Copper’s head cleared. “No one’s to eat another mouthful of kern. NoSohoth, I want every healthy dragon in the Rock out in the hills helping the parents of hatchlings. Sick parents can’t nurse their young. Rayg, what might help?”
“I’m no physiker, especially of dragons,” Rayg said. “Fluids usually help, whatever the malady or injury.”
“That will just speed their passing. Unconscious dragons will choke,” the Copper rasped. Rayg loved to build tunnels out of air.
“Of course, if you apply by the mouth.”
“How else are they supposed to get liquids?” NoSohoth asked, rolling his eyes.
“I saw one of my masters keep a cow with a broken jaw alive with injections through the . . . tailvent, you’d say.”
“Can you manage this, and teach NoFhyriticus the Gray and a few body-thralls?”
“I can make nozzles easily enough. Hollow bones will do. Cow or sheep bladders would work for the liquid—for adult dragons you’d need whole ox or pig skins. The liquid—hmmm.” Rayg muttered a few words in a language the Copper suspected was Dwarvish. Then he returned to Drakine. “Nothing fancy there. Water with the smallest portion of salt would do. Join them with gut. I can do all the work in your kitchens.”
“Make at least eight. One for the Rock, seven for the other hills.”
Rayg gave a curt bow. Was he losing a little of his hair? The Copper hated to think of such a valuable thrall aging. He’d have to make sure Rayg spent his declining years in some congenial Uphold with his family.
Assuming he could be spared.
“Am I excused, then?” Rayg asked.
“Of course. NoSohoth, aid him. If Mother Kyrithia herself is needed to wash out bladders, see that she does it.”
Mother Kyrithia ran the Imperial Line’s kitchens. She predated old Tyr FeHazathant and was indulged and bowed to more than the Copper. But she could make the stringiest old rock-lizard taste like the tenderest cut of veal.
There his mind went again, flying in two directions.
NoSohoth lingered. “And the old?”
“We’ll do what we can for them, but it’s the hatchlings we must see to.”
“One thing, my Tyr,” NoSohoth said, glancing at the ceiling where the bats hung.
“Yes?”
NoSohoth put his head close alongside the Copper’s and dropped his voice to a whisper. “As it stands now, this is a tragedy. Grieve with the families over their dead, and you will have their love and respect; the love between you and the hills of the Lavadome will be refreshed and renewed as it was in the days of your victory over the Dragonblade and the hag-riddens. Send this human in with his contraptions and his potions, and no doubt some hatchlings will die in any case. Suddenly you are responsible for their deaths. The physician’s dilemma.”
NoSohoth was always counseling the safety of inaction.
The Copper had received only one piece of wisdom from his parents once pushed off the shelf by the Gray Rat, a suggestion that he try to overcome. Somehow that had stuck with him more than all the lessons he’d learned in the Drakwatch caves, or the deep knowledge of the Anklenes. He would rather try to overcome this wretched blight than be a dignified picture of grief.
“Let them hate. Even a handful of hatchlings saved will count for more in the long flight. Our numbers are few enough.”
“My Tyr—”
“Do your best, NoSohoth. Perhaps I’ll put you in charge of the kern trade from now on, if you don’t mind one more burden.”
NoSohoth’s griff fluttered in excitement. “Speak not of burdens. The Empire and my Tyr have all I have to give. Virtue in the performance of one’s duties—”
“Find some reliable, scientifically minded Anklene to examine the kern-trains on arrival. Oh, and have Rayg show this blight to the physician.” The Copper had to cut NoSohoth off, or he’d be talking until a new coat of scales came in.
The thought of some gold quietly changing sii as a dragon was selected for the position might run NoSohoth’s mind down happier paths.
“A wise decision, my Tyr,” NoSohoth said.
“Now go help Rayg in the kitchens, would you? He’ll need some intelligent thralls who are used to working close to dragons. Start with the body-thralls.”
“Yes, my Tyr.”
“Tell my mate I’ll be with her shortly.”
“Yes, my Tyr.”
After NoSohoth left, the Copper looked up at the red eyes in the shadows above.
“Wail. Gnash. You’ve a long flight ahead of you.”
The bats dropped and glided down, landing on each wing close to the shoulder. They patted and nuzzled his ridge of collar muscle in a manner some might find affectionate, if the observer didn’t know they were searching for a vein.
The Copper had met a family of overlarge cave-bats as a hatchling. They had a taste for blood, and loved dragonblood above all things. Though it made them a little tipsy and insensible, it also had caused them to grow into bats of enormous proportions.
He’d adopted a line of bats, or perhaps they’d adopted him, much in the way a toothy lamprey adopts a whitefish, and they had become his most trusted—albeit dirtiest and laziest—servants. He’d cured them of fouling his sleeping chamber out of necessity. Nilrasha wouldn’t stand for bat-droppings.
“A sup, pleassse?” Wail keened.
“Not yet,” he warned. “I want you clearheaded.”
They hardly resembled bats anymore. The Copper wasn’t sure he understood what had happened, but everyone from Rayg to the Anklenes had their theories. The first generation of young bats raised on dragonblood grew uncommonly large and strong, flowers of batdom, long-lived and healthy. The second and third generations showed some odd . . . changes. Mutations, in Rayg’s strange word. Wail and Gnash, sister and brother, the first of the fourth-generation bats, fed almost exclusively on dragonblood as they grew into massive, thick-snouted, big-toothed, ridge-browed brutes with scaly skin and almost dragonlike claws. One of the Anklenes went so far as to call them gargoyles, a race that was thought to have died out over a thousand years earlier, along with their creator, Anklamere the Sorcerer. They hardly hung upside down save to sleep deeply, preferring to perch in the manner of griffaran when awake.
Wail was rather brighter than Gnash, so he turned his snout to her.
“You know the way to Anaea, right? You came along with me when CuPinnatax was installed as Upholder.”
“The west road, the lake, the bridge, yes—yess,” Wail said. She ran her red tongue across her fangs. “A hungry journey.”
“And you can help yourselves in a moment. In Anaea watch the kern. Examine the fields, especially the crop just coming up now. You know kern, right?”
“Tall green stalks, yes—yess,” Wail replied.
Gnash nodded. “Birds and mice and bugs among the stalks, good crunching.”
“Crunch away,” the Copper said. “But observe the crops. See if anything is being done to the kern, especially as it ripens. Look and see if anything is being put on it, either before or after it is harvested. I’ll send more of your kind to act as messengers. Or Wail, send Gnash if it’s important enough. He’s a fast flier.”
“Yes, yess,” Gnash said. “Fly the faster, I.”
“Now you may take some blood.”
He wouldn’t call either of them particularly intelligent, but they were wily enough and followed clear instructions.
Sadly, the bats had lost much of their numbing saliva that had made feeding earlier generations almost pleasant thanks to the light-headedness, but the wounds they made still healed clean and quick. The Copper winced as they opened his skin. But it was worth it to have eyes and ears loyal to him, though the rest of the dragons in the Lavadome thought of bats as vermin and found his “gargoyles” positively creepy.
Even those who secretly burned out their nests admitted the oversized bats had helped free the Lavadome of the hag-riders.
The bats burped and belched as they suckled, then rested briefly before taking off. The Copper poked his head out of his gallery and watched them disappear in the direction of the western tunnel, then headed up to the garden.
He felt exhausted and he’d hardly moved a dragonlength.
A little extra pallor wouldn’t be noticed. He’d been ill, after all.
After a long, slow climb—the best pace he could manage—he found Nilrasha holding informal court around the feeding pit. The pit, scene of innumerable feats, was a low bow-shaped trench-walkway with stairs going down to the kitchens where bearer-thralls could bring up platters. At formal feasts a continuous snake of joints and ragouts and racks and quarters, punctuated by the occasional squab on a skewer, passed under the dragons of the Imperial Line. Now only two thralls with platters of cold cut meat and toasted munchrooms passed, probably because Nilrasha felt it was impolite to have company without offering at least a gesture.